A data center may be defined as a location, for instance, a room that houses computer systems arranged in a number of racks. A standard rack, for example, an electronics cabinet, is defined as an Electronics Industry Association (EIA) enclosure, 78 in. (2 meters) high, 24 in. (0.61 meter) wide and 30 in. (0.76 meter) deep. These racks are configured to house a number of computer systems, about forty (40) systems, with future configurations of racks being designed to accommodate 200 or more systems. The computer systems typically include a number of printed circuit boards (PCBs), mass storage devices, power supplies, processors, micro-controllers, and semi-conductor devices that dissipate relatively significant amounts of heat during their operation. For example, a typical computer system comprising multiple microprocessors dissipates approximately 250 W of power. Thus, a rack containing forty (40) computer systems of this type dissipates approximately 10 KW of power.
In relatively large data centers, a plurality of computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units are variously positioned to provide cooling airflow to the computer systems. In this regard, the CRAC units are typically positioned to provide cooling airflow to respective ones of the computer systems. If one of the CRAC units were to fail in providing sufficient levels of cooling airflow to its associated computer systems, those computer systems will also begin to fail shortly following the CRAC unit failure, assuming those associated computer systems are not receiving adequate cooling airflow from another CRAC unit. The failures in those computer systems are likely to cause delays in the performance of various computing functions or cause the various computing functions to shutdown completely. The costs associated with the delays or shutdowns may be relatively high if the CRAC unit failure is not fixed in a relatively short period of time.
Thus, it would be desirable to be able to mitigate the losses in productivity associated with CRAC unit failures.